The latest information and perspectives on Oracle Enterprise Manager

Thursday Apr 24, 2014

Today, I stumbled over a competitor blog, conspicuous by its factual incorrectness on Enterprise Manager Snap Clone. However, I must compliment the author of the blog, because inadvertently, he has
raised a point that we have been highlighting all along.The author, with reference to Dataguard and storage technologies, argues against the cobbling of technologies together and adding another technology stack to the mix
without any automated management.

Precisely the point! In the wide realm of technologies, there are
necessities and there are accessories aka nice-to-haves. The necessities are
technologies that are needed anyway, such as a high fidelity, high performance storage from a
reputed vendor or a good DR solution for a mission critical database environment.
Similarly, for any Oracle DBA worth his/her salt, Enterprise Manager 12c is a
necessity, a part of the daily life. The Enterprise Manager agent, keeping vigil on every host, is therefore not an overhead, but the representative (the "agent" in true sense) of the DBA. Deep diagnostics, performance management, large scale configuration
management, patching and compliance management make Enterprise Manager the
darling of any Oracle DBA. All surveys suggest that any DBA spends considerable
amount of time in Enterprise Manager for performing things beyond just data cloning, so why invest in an accessory for the cloning
of Oracle test databases and unnecessarily proliferate the number of point
tools (and possibly several instances of them) that you need to manage and maintain, not to ignore the past history that cites that very few such point tools solved customers' CAPEX and OPEX problems over the long run. It is like using spreadsheet for expenses and ERP for all other financial tasks.This is not to suggest that these point tools do not have
good, innovative features. Over my tenure in the industry, I have come across
several such tools with nice features, but often the hidden costs outweigh the
benefits. Our position in this aspect has been consistent, whether it is on a competitor’s tool or our own.
Few years back, we integrated My Oracle Support into Enterprise Manager with
the same consistent goal that Enterprise Manager will serve as the single pane
of glass for the Oracle ecosystem. Same has been our position on any product that we acquire.

Snap Clone's support for Dataguard and native storage stems from popular customer
demand to leverage technologies they already invested in, and not create standalone
islands of automation. Moreover, several customers have voiced in favor of the
performance and scalability advantages that they would get by leveraging the
native storage APIs. How else would you support one of the world's largest banks, a Snap Clone customer, who
performs 60,000 (sixty thousand) data refreshes per year! In any case, that
should not imply that we bind ourselves to any of those technologies. We do
support cloning on various storage systems based on ZFS filesystem. Similarly,
the Test Master refresh can be achieved with one among RMAN, Dataguard, Golden Gate or
storage replication and optionally orchestrated with EM Job System.

Enterprise Manager 12c has taken a great step in delivering features via
plugins that can be revisioned independent of the framework. An unwanted side
effect is that the awareness often lags what is actually supported in the
latest version of the product. For example, the filesystem support was
introduced last Fall. And of course Enterprise Manager 12c Snap Clone supports
RAC. My esteemed colleague and DBA par excellence, in her blog has highlighted some of these to
dispel some of the prevalent awareness issues. Snap Clone's usage among the E-Business Suite and Developer community does not need any special accreditation. It is heavily used by the world's largest E-Business Suite Developer community-the Oracle E-Business Suite Engineering organization itself! It is true that Snap Clone does not support restoration to any arbitrary
point in time, but then our customers and prospects have not voiced a need for
it. In reality, most customers want to perform intermediate data transformation such as masking
and subsetting as they clone from production to test, and Enterprise Manager
12c already boasts of sophisticated data masking technologies, again via the same interface. It also includes testing features like Real Application Testing (RAT) that can complement and follow the test database creation. Future releases of Enterprise Manager will support a tighter integration among
these features.

Snap Clone is delivered as a part of the Database as a Service feature set that has been pioneering, industry-leading and getting adopted at a great pace.
Little wonder that we have already received a copious amount of Openworld paper
submissions on the topic. In this emerging trend of DBaaS adoption, we find no reason to fragment the tasks such as fresh database
creation, pluggable database provisioning and cloning across silo'ed point tools (not to mention broader PaaS capabilities which may be needed for complete application testing). Each
use case could be different but needs a single service delivery platform.EM12c is that platform for Oracle. Period. So, think twice before 'adding another
technology to the mix'. You do not need to.

Tuesday Apr 22, 2014

Attendees at the Collaborate14 User Conference held in Las Vegas earlier this month were offered fantastic opportunities to hone their expertise in Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c (EM) while building a network with increasing numbers of IT professionals focusing their passions around EM. These pros seek to take advantage of EM’s ability in a quest to reduce downtime, improve staff productivity, reduce capital expenditures and increase IT agility while lowering the cost of managing IT.

There was certainly a lot from which to choose, as I reported in my prior blog. After getting back from the conference and attending several of those
sessions, it seemed as if EM was
everywhere! Well over fifty Collaborate14 lectures, workshops, expert sessions and quick-tip sessions featuring EM exclusively or significantly were delivered. Most of the sessions were given by partners and customers, all of whom desire to share their significant EM expertise with others.

On pre-conference Monday, the three hands-on workshops (Cloud Odyssey, Oracle Database Lifecycle Management and Application Management for Oracle EBS) were fun and deeply educational, proving you had to be there in order to appreciate fully. And the conference sessions were well attended both in person and online, covering the waterfront in terms of effectively managing the enterprise.

Just some of the focus areas:

Techniques and best practices to monitor and manage the IT environment effectively through the use of the EM framework and through EMCLI

Deep-dives into Oracle Database 12c in diagnosing, tuning and managing the lifecycle of Oracle Database 12c

How to provide and manage Oracle in the cloud, specifically in the area of Database as a Service (DBaaS) and quick provisioning of the storage it goes with

Advanced management of Oracle Applications

I would be remiss to not mention the new Special Interest Groups (SIGs) formed or being formed around Enterprise Manager. In addition to the networking opportunities and the one-to-one best practice sharing that naturally occurs when like-minded folks get together, SIGs work to enhance critical skills and foster professional growth. Make sure you sign up for them so you don’t miss out on the events being planned. At the conference:

IOUG’s rapidly growing Enterprise Manager SIG drew at least fifty at their “Birds of a Feather” meeting. Request to join this SIG here. More info about this SIG and how to join it is at the IOUG Enterprise Manager SIG Community site.

The IOUG Cloud Computing SIG, considered a companion to EM since it prominently features it, had a good crowd. Find out more at the IOUG Cloud Computing SIG.

An inaugural OAUG Enterprise Manager for Oracle Applications SIG formation meeting had significant attendance and interest. Look for more about this SIG and how to participate in it in a future post.

Wire-to-wire it was well worth it, and next year it will be even more so. Until that time, expect to hear a lot from the regional user groups and the SIGs about EM.

Monday Apr 21, 2014

Do you still maintain a spreadsheet with Database or Server contact or business unit ownership? In Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c (EM) Target Properties allow you to store descriptive target information, such as Contact or Location, which can then be used in dynamic/administration group definition, reports, incident rules and notifications. This blog will show you how you can better leverage the features of EM to store your configuration data and utilize it to the fullest extent.

This detailed technical article explains the set up and
scheduling of full and incremental RMAN Database backups for thousands of databases using Enterprise Manager 12c, and how this is done more easily and efficiently than the older, more time-consuming, manual method of performing
Unix shell scripting, RMAN scripting, and CRON jobs for each database to be backed up.

And with the Database Group Backup feature new to Enterprise
Manager 12c, it can be even faster to set up RMAN backups for multiple databases - even if there are
thousands - that are part of an Enterprise Manager Database Group (one kind of target group).

The article also highlights the advantages of using Pluggable Databases (PDBs) in
Oracle Database 12c and backing them up using RMAN. RMAN cannot backup
individual schemas, and it has always been difficult to perform
point-in-time-recovery (PITR) at an individual schema level, since schemas can
easily be distributed across multiple tablespaces. The advantage in using PDBs
in a Container Database is that you can easily set up RMAN backups at the
Container Database level, and yet perform PITR at the PDB level. This is a
clear technical advantage of the Multi-tenant architecture of Oracle Database
12c.

The set up and scheduling of RMAN database backups forms a part
of the Base Database Management features of Enterprise Manager that enables
numerous customers to get familiar with the day-to-day use of Enterprise
Manager 12c. The full list of Base Database Management features can be found in the Enterprise Manager Licensing Information guide here.

In fact I had personally introduced Enterprise Manager to one
of India’s largest financial services organizations in India in 2007 for the purpose of their RMAN backups,
they started using it for the first time, and today we are proud to say that
they are an Enterprise Manager reference customer who have presented in OOW for the last 2
years. The following slide is from their recent OOW presentation.

One thing I forgot to include in the article (and yes, it is a
long article) was on reporting of the RMAN backups. A few readers asked me that
question after the article’s publication, both inside and outside Oracle.

I told them that if they were using an RMAN catalog, the catalog
would have this information and could easily be queried. If they were not using
a catalog, then this backup information would be stored in the control file,
and they would have to query each database’s control file (using V$ views) to
get the backup report. BI Publisher, installed as an add-on to Enterprise
Manager, could be used for this purpose. However note that if BI Publisher is
used to query information from a source other than the Enterprise Manager
repository database, a license is payable for each database it accesses.

Tuesday Apr 08, 2014

Here
is a great article from resident Oracle ACE, Arup
Nanda, who details insight into predicting the impact of consolidating
separate database workloads into one. The article outlines a typical consolidation
scenario and explains how Oracle Real Application Testing's Consolidated
Database Replay capabilities can help measure the impact of the workload
consolidation. A
must read for those considering a consolidation project in the near future.
Read
the article.

Since the demands
from the business for IT services is non-stop, creating copies of production
databases in order to develop, test and deploy new applications can be
labor intensive and time consuming. Users may also need to preserve private
copies of the database, so that they can go back to a point prior to when
a change was made in order to diagnose potential issues. Using Snap Clone,
users can create multiple snapshots of the database and “time
travel” across these snapshots to access data from any point
in time.

Join us for an in-depth
technical webcast and learn how Oracle Cloud Management Pack for Oracle
Database's capability called Snap Clone, can fundamentally improve the
efficiency and agility of administrators and QA Engineers while saving
CAPEX on storage. Benefits include:

Tuesday Apr 01, 2014

Since
the launch of Oracle
Enterprise Manager 12c Release 3, we have received tons of
questions around managing Oracle
Multitenant, an Oracle Database 12c Enterprise Edition option,
and pluggable databases (PDBs)—more specifically; questions about
pluggable database as a service (PDBaaS). In
this blog, we provide answers to some of the common questions from people.

Question:
What qualifies a database to be pluggable?Answer: A pluggable database must be a current Oracle
Database 12c database, configured for multitenant through a new enterprise
edition option called Oracle
Multitenant. It delivers a new architecture that allows a multitenant
container database (CDB) to hold many pluggable databases (PDBs). An Oracle
Database in the old architecture (a “non-CDB”) may be upgraded
to the multitenant architecture via a simple process known as “adopting
the non-CDB as a PDB”. A PDB is a self-contained, fully functional
Oracle Database, and includes its own system, sysaux and user tablespaces.
You can learn more about Oracle Multitenant and pluggable database in
this whitepaper.

Can the pluggable
databases be plugged and unplugged across multiple platforms such as Solaris,
AIX, and Linux? The pluggable
database must be endian compatible. Cross endian operations require OGG,
Data pump or restore from backup.

In terms
of database consolidation, what are the differences between using VMs,
dedicated schemas and pluggable databases?
To describe the advantages of using pluggable database vs. other consolidation
methods, it can be best illustrated in a simply comparison table.

Comparison of Database as a Service Consolidation Models

Pluggable database combines
the best of all the other models and offers excellent consolidation, isolation,
manageability and is suitable for any application that is certified to
run on Oracle Database 12c. With the other models, we see certain shortcomings.
For example, server virtualization offers good isolation but creates compliance
and administrative headaches. Schema based consolidation offers ease of
management and patching, but limited isolation.

How do you
track configuration drift with a pluggable database? I certainly understand
drift in the container database, but in what ways would a pluggable database
drift from its standard baseline?This pertains to Configuration
Drift Tracking via Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c. One can compare any
two Enterprise Manager targets or a complete system such as an Oracle
Exadata Database Machine. When you compare at the PDB level, they can
differ in the tablespace names, the storage settings of tablespace with
same name, or users, etc. Using Oracle Enterprise Manager to track drift,
it is particularly useful in comparing difference in your development,
testing, and production environments. It is even useful for comparing
your standby systems to set standards for compliance requirements.

What is a
zone? Is it physical? Regional?
The Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Cloud resource model involves pooling
the same target types where it’s combining similar hosts, databases,
hardware or other similar resources in to a zone. Zones can therefore
be defined by the boundary of the Cloud and exposed through Oracle Enterprise
Manager 12c’s self-service portal. In terms of the pluggable database
as a service model, you can create Oracle Multitenant container databases
and group them to form a database pool that users can then draw from.
When the self-service user provisions a pluggable database, they need
to simply specify the Zone where they want to deploy. Internally, Oracle
Enterprise Manager uses load or configuration driven algorithms to place
the PDB in the right CDB.

What will
be the DBA and SYSADMIN role in the pluggable DBaaS environment?
With pluggable databases you have common users and local users as well
as common roles and associated privileges and local roles and associated
privileges. You can isolate user/role/privilege to the PDB by defining
only local user/role/privilege. To leverage the manage many as one, you
would define common user/role/privilege to act on all PDBs or a subset
of PDBs where the common user has create session privileges within the
PDB. You would define DBA roles and SYSADMIN roles based on common and/or
local user roles.

What if you
need custom configurations on a pluggable database? Once the database
is deployed via self-service how do you make changes?
Some parameters are modifiable at the PDB level. You would check v$parameter
ISPDB_MODIFIABLE value to determine what can be changed. Some customization
can be done at the CDB level; however, they would affect all PDBs for
that CDB. Oracle Enterprise Manager’s self-service provides a TNS
Connect string to connect to the PDB with the right privilege and execute
“ALTER SYSTEM” for the parameters that are permissible to
change.

If I'm an
application developer and I request a database with a certain pre-defined
service level, what level of permissions should I expect with that database?
Am I getting DBA or SYSDBA privileges with that request?
It depends on what was negotiated as part of the service definition and
associated user/role/privileges defined for that service.

Are the pluggable
database as a service capabilities for Oracle Database 12c included in
Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c? Do we need a plug-in? Do we need to license
Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Database Management Packs?
You need the Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c database and cloud plug-ins.
License-wise; the self-service provisioning from Oracle Enterprise Manager
is licensed as part of Cloud Management Pack for Database. The Oracle
Multitenant option must be licensed if two or more PDBs are plugged into
a single CDB.
Watch this short demo called “Using
Pluggable Database as a Service (PDBaaS) Self-Service Portal”
for a better understanding of deploying PDBaaS using Oracle Enterprise
Manager 12c.

Which Oracle
Enterprise Manager 12c Management Packs are required to be able to provide
DBaaS?
You need the Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Cloud Management Pack for Database
and Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Lifecycle Management Pack for Database
to do database as a service. Both of which must be licensed.

If you have
shared memory and background processes in the container database, how
do you allocate server resources to a particular pluggable database? Can
you assign specific amount of CPU cycles, RAM and IOPS for a given pluggable
database? SQL
execution is scoped to the PDB as identified by the con_id created during
session create. In Oracle Database 12c, Resource Manager (RM) has been
extended to include support for Oracle Multitenant. Policies may be defined
at the PDB level in terms of the simple-yet-powerful concepts of “caps”
and “shares” to determine the allocation of resources between
PDBs. In this way, resource manager can control allocation of CPU, sessions
and parallel execution servers. Additionally, on Oracle Exadata, Resource
Manager can also manage IO and network. Memory management currently is
implicitly managed through SGA LRU algorithms and CPU share management.

What is the
largest number of pluggable databases you can deploy on Oracle Exadata?
Currently the PDB limit per CDB is 252 PDBs. In Oracle Real Application
Clusters environments such as Oracle Exadata, the density of PDB consolidation
greatly increases as you may have multiple CDBs per physical server and
252 PDBs per CDB. The maximum limit would be bound by compute resource
constraints/limits. And as mentioned in the question on Zone, Oracle Enterprise
Manager gives an ability to combine multiple CDBs into a Pool and handle
transparent placement. The Oracle Enterprise Manager self-service user
therefore won’t be exposed to the underlying limit.

Can I use
pluggable database as a service if the target database is 9i or 10g?You would need to migrate
the Oracle Database 9i, 10g and 11g databases to Oracle Database 12c non-CDB
and convert them into pluggable databases. The architectural changes within
Oracle Database 12c are not backward compatible.

Can Active
Data Guard be configured for selective pluggable databases from a container
database? I do not want all pluggable databases to have a standby.In
the current release, Oracle Active Data Guard operates at the container
level, however, PDB annotations are tagged in the redo stream, so PDB
operations on the primary are reflected on the standby.

Does RMAN
support pluggable databases?
Scheduled backups are at the CDB layer and include all PDBs. Ad-hoc backups
can be executed on individual PDBs. Individual PDBs can be restored from
backup.